i chose these images based on … well, not much at all really. Just stuff that was foremost on my hard drive. Given more than 5 minutes, I could probably do better … but this is still more attractive than the blank space that is the default on Storify.

This example uses a variety of quickly-chosen and lightly edited images to fit the radically horizontal image space on Storify.

Damn. Things are getting heavy. Journalists are being attacked by paid provocateurs:

Journalists being beaten by thugs: Hromadske.TV’s Dmytro Gnap was stomped, his camera smashed, and the memory card stolen.

The pro-Russian government in Ukraine is using “titushki” — paid provocateurs hired to disrupt rallies and provoke police, according to the Kyiv Post.

These protesters are acting like morons, trying to make the protests look like they are violent and anarchic. They are helped along in this mission by some of the more casual protesters, who show up after having a few drinks, and seem to be mainly interested in the more festive aspects of the protest.

I was asked by my students if there were ways that they could publish their stories, videos and audios, without having to give up control to media companies that really aren’t all that interested in publishing new & interesting content from unknown authors. Well, not unless it is given to them free, with no obligations to pay any residuals or royalties, and they have exclusive rights to publish and market that content in all media known or unknown, throughout the universe, until the end of time.

There are a bunch of companies that have sprung up that publish multimedia books – you’ll have to do some research to see which one would offer you the best deal for your project.

1. Vook – they started off just doing ebooks with video embedded. These were interesting as experiments, but really didn’t push the form very far. Now, they’ve started publishing to all the major platforms (rather than trying to establish themselves as an alternative to Amazon, with their own proprietary standards – a losing game, if ever there was one).

The first Vooks were like the first CD-ROMs. They had text on them with cutscenes of dubious quality. Usually made from literature that was in the public domain (i.e. free for some geek to hammer on without having to pay fees to the pesky creative writer-types).

2. Atavist – this is a company that started in beta last year. I was excited about them, but have to admit that I kinda lost the thread. Not sure if they’re good, bad or whatever. Still, they seem to have some decent content & authors on their site, and the company was founded by Evan Ratliff, who was a hotshot at Wired.

The Atavist is both a publishing tool and a sales platform for journalists interested in producing long-form stories. The tool was a bit rough & buggy when I tried it a year ago; I have my hopes that they’ve gotten better.

3. Inkling – These guys got buttloads of startup capital to help them launch. They aimed at taking over the hundred-billion $$ plus textbook market. Didn’t get much traction there … there’s a story that I’ve heard whispers of, involving huge under-the-table graft payments by crooked school districts, kickbacks to publishers, sabotage, etc. Dunno. Conspiracy theories abound in the margins of the digital migration. What I do know is that they have  published some of the best interactive books that I’ve seen – check out their volumes on how to shoot & light interesting photos, or on music appreciation. They seem to be trying to move into the consumer market right now. I do know that their publishing terms can be stingingly punitive, however – they demand mucho dinero upfront, or a big-ass slice of your earnings. Most of their stuff has a really, really high price point – $100 and up is not uncommon, if you click around the “Business” section. Still, their tech works.

Inkling seems to be aimed at the high-end textbook market. Their technology is great. Their fees likewise.

4. iBooks Author – the “DIY” route. You have to do all the heavy lifting of laying out the book, embedding your videos, working out the kinks as you export to the iBookstore … however, the barrier to entry is basically nonexistent.  You will find that there are complexities undreamt-of in the layout process. This is a crude tool, in many respects, but it does get the job done.

iBooks has a lot in common with the other Apple “GrannyWare” in that it tries to dumb things down to the point where any dimwit can use it. The downside of this is that when you try to take control & do something complex, you are stymied at every turn (such as when you try to produce a book that works in both portrait and landscape mode).

5. Adobe DPS (Digital Publishing Suite) – this is the Big Daddy of ePublishing options. You can produce a full-featured “magazine app” style publication that contains all your videos, text, maps, timelines, interactive elements, etc. And you can get it into the Apple App store. And you can be up until 4 a.m. pulling your hair out. The learning curve on this one is steep … but if you figure out how to publish your own material, whatever it may be, and get it consistently into the App Store, AND figure out how to market/advertise it to get people to pay cash dinero for this, you will not NEED to work for a media company.  You will BE a media company.

The Adobe DPS is a cradle-to-grave publishing suite, that allows you to control every pixel, every interaction in a full-fledged “Magazine App.” It’s great for control freaks … who have years of free time to learn all the ins and outs of every single conceivable app in the Adobe Creative Suite.

I mentioned this development in digital news to my journalism classes at Annenberg, and figured I might want to expand a bit more on it, and provide some links to related articles & research.

(Google Data Center from Wallpaperstart.com)

First, forgive me if this is old news, but I haven’t heard much about this from the usual suspects; for some reason, there isn’t much notice being taken of this by publishers, or professional journalists.

But the PR guys are all over this. Viz: How Google’s ‘In-Depth Articles’ feature could affect PR

Nut grafs:

The feature, which Google calls “In-Depth Articles,” offers up links to a set of three long-form articles, usually at the bottom of the search results page. The articles are usually detailed profiles and exposés on companies and their leadership. Companies and high-profile individuals should take notice of this development and understand that it presents a number of opportunities, as well as some perils. 

No one but Google itself knows exactly how these articles are selected, but the search engine giant has described them as “thoughtful in-depth content” that “remains relevant long after its publication date.” This is a major coup for traditional long-form publications such as Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair,Fortune, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, as well as new online-only media such as The Verge,SB Nation, and Slate. 

The implications for businesses, prominent individuals, and the people in charge of maintaining the reputations thereof, are pretty significant, if not outright terrifying.

Imagine that you’re the Chief Marketing Officer for Great Big Widget Co.  You’ve spent years and many thousands of dollars on SEO to ensure that anyone searching for Great Big Widgets sees only positive information on the first page of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), because, as we all know, it’s only when you’re really desperate for an answer that you click past the first page of results, right?

So anyway, you’ve pushed out all sorts of content, carefully curated relevant keyword-related blogs posts, PR releases, short videos on YouTube, etc. etc. You’ve put out a whole spectrum of content to make sure that anyone searching for Great Big Widgets sees stuff that makes them want to reach for their wallets & pull out their credit cards. Operators are standing by, and the PayPal, yes indeed it is accepted.

But now you scroll to the bottom of the page of your SERPs and — what’s this? Three articles there, that you had thought long ago safely buried and dealt with. Three long-form journalism articles about how the CEO is a greedy megalomaniac, the Board of Directors a circle-jerk of yes-men, the employees all working 80 hours a week while management loots their pension funds, billions in taxes being sheltered in offshore funds to evade taxes,  … you know, standard business practices. But now, there they are, right on the front page of Google, where anybody can see them. Where everybody can see them.

This is going to make it very hard for corporate marketing teams to paper over ugly little scandals. It is also going to ensure that every once in a while, some digital David is going to research/shoot/write the kind of piece that slays a corporate Goliath … if for no other reason than the fact that the article is well-researched, upvoted by users on Reddit/DailyKos/Slashdot/BoingBoing/Wherever, and hits the magic algorithm criteria for inclusion in the search results.

Is this going to be a replacement for the news business? No. Let Moz (formerly SEOMoz) explain:

Clearly, it’s hard not to see a news and big media connection in these in-depth articles. Are in-depth articles a replacement for news results? No (at least not for now) – many of the results we tracked had both in-depth articles and a news box.

(snip)

While big news organizations have an advantage, there’s no compelling evidence that in-depth articles are a private club. In fact, Google has already posted a support document with advice on getting listed in in-depth articles. I’ll give you a quick-and-dirty summary:

• Use Schema.org article markup
• Set up authorship markup
• Set up a Google+ account, including your logo
• Properly handle paginated articles
• Use “first click free” for paywall content

Google has come under a lot of criticism worldwide for not really contributing to the growth of human knowledge. Sure, they make it more accessible to everyone; but they have also made it harder and harder for the kinds of people who do original, boots-on-the-ground research, to actually survive & make a living from doing the hard work that creates all the knowledge that Google needs to exist so they can link to it.

It’s no secret that investigative reporting was the first thing that news organizations cut when the revenue crisis hit. Investigative reporting is long, tedious, hard and EXPENSIVE work. There are some stories that just cannot be done via crowdsourcing, kickstarting or hoping that the magic Internet fairy brings buttloads of cash and consulting opportunities that will help pay for your server & bandwidth costs.

Maybe the kind of traffic that this evolution of search will bring to in-depth journalism is a step towards more of a partnership between traditional news agencies and the digital startups that depend on them for their living.

Further reading: GigaOm: http://gigaom.com/2013/08/06/google-results-will-now-show-3-in-depth-articles-topics-include-censorship-and-lego/

SearchEngineLand: http://searchengineland.com/google-introducing-in-depth-articles-to-search-results-168909

As a follow-up to my previous post about the “Secrets of Silicon Valley” post, there was something that Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin said, that stuck with me:

“I get thousands of pitches every month. And all of them suck. They tell me all about these numbers and charts and graphs. But what I really want to know is, ‘Why are you doing this? What makes you want to start this company.’  And then they relax, and they tell me what I really want to know.”

This made me think of an encounter I had with a guy back when the job titles “Entrepreneur” did not have the suffused halo of glory around it that it does now. Looking back, this short conversation was one of the transformative experiences in my life. It’s what has driven me to consistently take the road less traveled in my career.

When you try to imagine the most valuable thing in the world, what does it look like? Does it look like something in a museum, where people come from around the world and pay money just to look at it? Is it a Special Thing, ancient and mysterious, that you can own? Or is it something quite else…

In 1987, I was a Pulliam Fellow at the Arizona Republic, working as a copy editor. That meant that I had most of the day free – I went in at about 3 p.m. each day, stayed until midnight and pretty much lived like a bat. So during the day, I explored the city of Tempe, where I lived, and tried to cool off by swimming and enjoying the pool (hey – I’d grown up in Wisconsin, where the rare days you got when it was sunny and warm you automatically headed towards bodies of water to enjoy this amazing gift of weather).

So I was  basking in the pool, when I was addressed by an older guy, who was leaning against the side of the pool, elbows on the fringe, watching the sun set. He looked content, but thoughtful.  He was tanned like a saddle, with piercing blue eyes, and a bemused expression on his face. He asked who I was and what I was doing in Phoenix.

I told him that I was there, fresh out of college, working for this gigantic media company. But that it was a little strange to me, because the company was so big that I felt like just a little cog in a big machine.

Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing – if I believed in what the Big Machine was doing, and if I actually felt that the Big Machine cared in any way for all the cogs that had to mesh to make it run. Neither of which were true.

He frowned, and nodded his head.

“You’re coming to a point in your life where you’re going to have to make some very important decision,” he said.

I snorted, with the derision that only a 21-year-old recent college grad can muster. “Everyone keeps telling me that. But that just sounds like platitudes. What is that supposed to me to me? Every decision we make is important – we cross the street for breakfast, we get run over – hey, that was a life-changing decision! You look at it that way, hell, every decision you make is life and death.”

To his credit, he laughed. “Well, I guess that’s true. But I was thinking of something a bit different than what you do. It’s more about who you really are.”

And then he launched into the story of his life. Turns out that he was not retired, because he never planned on retiring, because every day he did what he loved. He had been a DC-3 pilot in WWII, flying the supply routes that went “Over the Hump,” or over the Himalaya mountains and into China. These were white-knuckle rides, because depending on how loaded down the old “Goonie Birds” were, you may or may not make it over these 20,000-foot peaks.

Each flight through the treacherous mountain passes was a gamble. As the odds against long-term survival mounted, the pilot I talked to said he just gave up the idea of control — that enemy fighters or sudden blizzards could trump any preparations humans could make. Simultaneously, he paid attention to all the little details that might mean the difference between survival and violent death.

He was terrified for the first few flights, and then he basically gave himself up for dead, and started having the time of his life. Most beautiful landscape in the world, wild adventures on either side of the flight, danger, and the feeling of contributing something meaningful to something really important, something that was bigger than him, something that was forever changing the world.

After the war, he started an airline. It was the wild & woolly days back then, not like today when there are basically highways in the sky, you never get lost, it’s all worked out for you. Back then, you were making it all up as you went along, trying to figure out what planes at what times into what airports would get there on time and make money.

But by his combination of daring (from the recklessness that he pursued life from flying over The Hump), and meticulous planning – because he had checked out every inch of every plane and every flight plan before he took off, which is why he survived and so did his whole crew – that combination made him successful.

He built an airline. Made millions. Had a big house and a pinup girl wife.

Was miserable. Hated running the company. Hated all the problems that come with having a lot of money.

So he divorced his wife. Gave her everything. Started from scratch. With a new woman in his life. He said that he had learned something really crazy about himself. He didn’t like being rich.

Making it back was no sure thing (image from Life magazine archives – click through for more).

He liked the struggle, the fight, the ups and downs, the thrills of BECOMING rich.

So he would repeat this pattern. Over and over again. He’d build a company – sometimes airlines, sometimes aeronautical service companies, or plane design firms – build it up until it was huge …

…and then he’d give it away, and start all over from scratch again.

I told this story to my mom, who grew up on a farm in the shadow of the Great Depression, to a father who had twice lost everything he had and worked himself into an early grave trying to provide for 8 kids … and my mom said, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

And for a long time, I agreed with her. What kind of a moron builds something only to give it all away? What kind of person can’t see that you earn money through struggle and pain? That every dollar is a treasure, and that you cling to it as hard as you can?

But then I remembered what that tough old pilot said, back when I said something very similar:

“Think about the most valuable thing in the world. Maltese Falcon, huge diamond, priceless painting – whatever. In your head, I want you to imagine having something that, if you had it, every other person you know would envy you. Just green-eyed, jealousy, eating their own heart out. Day and night, everyone wants what you’ve got, this Special Thing. There’s only one. And you have it.

But there’s a catch. Something that nobody else knows, that you’re trying hard not to let them see. The catch is that  hanging onto the Special Thing is killing you. Burning your hands. Feels like fishhooks ripping into your fingers every second you have it in your possession.

But still, everyone passing by says, “OMG! What a lucky guy! Just look at that Special Thing! I sure wish I had that thing!” All the while, it’s just killing you to hang onto it. And you can’t put it down.

The question you have to ask yourself is: would you hold onto that thing?

Would you choose to live in pain, in isolation, in anger, in contempt for everyone you see as lesser than you – would you choose to live that way just so you could conform to some other people’s ideas of how it is that you should feel, and what it is that you should want?

Would you hold on to that thing?

Or would you put it down and say, here. You take it. And while they pick it up and laugh at you – you’re the one that’s laughing at them inside. Because they have to deal with that Special Thing now. And you? You’re free.

And you’re going to build something else now. And building that … whatever it is … building that, is what makes you feel like you have the most valuable thing in the world already.

That was a man with rare courage. He was able to look deeply inside himself and not only see, but accept what it was that made him happy. And then he acted on that knowledge, even when the rest of the world said that he was an idiot. That he had lost his mind.

But he knew what he had to do. Because he literally couldn’t live any other way.

To me, that is the core trait of the entrepreneur.

Janine & I just completed two days of intense sessions with some of Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs at creativeLIVE’s “Secrets of Silicon Valley” sessions. And yes, that was really alliterative.  Sorry. Bear with me. Everyone talked in such catchy bullet-point laden phrases that it leaked over into my speech patterns.

The walls of the creativeLIVE breakroom are festooned with flatscreen monitors showing what’s on their various channels. Most fascinating of all are the real-time “heatmaps” showing who’s watching at any moment, bordered by the latest comments on Twitter and Facebook.  The “Secrets of Silicon Valley” was watched by people in more than 130 countries. In the map, you see clusters of red and white dots representing the audience through my reflection as I took this photo.

If nothing else, these two days were proof that above all else, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have mastered the talent of giving really beautifully designed and stripped-down PowerPoint presentations.

Seriously folks, if you’ve ever suffered through a “Death By PowerPointless” presentation where you were assaulted with dense bullet-point slides with hundreds of words on them … slide after slide after slide, none of them memorable, that made you fantasize about massive natural disasters, zombie apocalypse or alien invasions … these two days were not that.

Here’s what was so special about the “Secrets of Silicon Valley” speakers, who are entitled to have more than their share of ego and self-satisfaction: they didn’t just brag. Nor did they ramble on in thinly disguised sales brochures for their companies.

The most compelling speakers hardly mentioned their companies. Instead, their focus was on us, the audience. On what we needed to know.

The speakers knew what they were going to say, and they said it with humor, efficiency and – most unexpectedly, from a group of uber-nerds – humanity.

If you get a chance, check out the speech by Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, where he talks about the lesson he learned the day he totaled his car, bribed a thief with a van full of stolen bikes, proceeded to vandalize his own car with a crowbar (much to the amusement of watching taxi drivers), and collapse in despair, thinking that he had just blown an interview that meant life or death for his company. (Don’t worry – he salvaged the NY Times interview by telling the entire saga to the reporter, who laughed, and rewarded his openness with a key mention.)

Spencer Raskoff, the CEO of Zillow, tried to reassure would-be entrepreneurs by recounting how it took one of his companies 3 years and $50-75 million in marketing to figure out how to attract customers. Me? I just kept expecting him to yell “LLOYD!” at the top of his lungs, and start ranting about Turtle, E and Johnny Drama…

A recurring theme was that being honest and open about failings is a key ingredient to success. So many entrepreneurs think they have to hide the truth. But multiple speakers said it’s a must for entrepreneurs to admit to having problems, saying essentially, “If you claim everything is always fine, I know you’re lying. Show me how you’ll solve the problems.”

One of the more touching moments came when an audience of aggressive, hardened entrepreneurs teared up at the unexpected message in an video ad for Zillow, which I’ve embedded below:

Spencer Raskoff of Zillow gleefully read comments from the Twitterstream about this ad, mostly from people who were bawling like babies. Me? Naw. I had something in my eye.

Contacts were drying out or something.

BTW – what is it with these real-estate guys being total charmers, some of the best damn storytellers I’ve ever run across? If you share my belief that someone should disrupt the real-estate industry, check out the presentations from all three real estate-related companies, Zillow, RedFin, and NextDoor. What their founders all have in common is that they are changing the way people “find their way home.”

Guy Kawasaki made us smile, real smiles, the ones that exercise the orbicularis oculi muscles (the ones that form a “duchenne” smile, i.e. one that is actually genuine & reaches the eyes).

Guy Kawasaki introduced himself as Apple’s first product evangelist, back when they were pretty much inventing the whole concept of what a product evangelist was supposed to do. Not surprisingly, Guy has a grizzled Tech O.G.’s perspective:

“If not for PageMaker, we’d all have phones with physical keyboards. With batteries that last more than a day. And maps that don’t take you to Marin when you’re trying to make it to Potrero.”

As a rah-rah guy for tech for the past 30 years, it wasn’t surprising that Guy lit up when he talked about how technology not only got him the hot-rod of his dreams, but also allowed him to make sure his sons can’t drive it over 55 mph after they drop him off at the airport. Apparently, his Mustang GT500 has a special “MyKey” that he can program to save his toy from his teenagers.

“Finish is its own F-word.” Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha offered somewhat pungent wisdom. I appreciated their no-bullshit approach to evaluating whether your billion-dollar wild idea for a startup is actually worth pursuing. Gotta say – founding multiple billion-dollar companies does give Reid some credibility on the subject.

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, who co-wrote The Startup of You, talked about how best to build the kind of team at a startup that will allow you to go forth and conquer the world, even when the road to fortune and glory is impossible, impassible and utterly invisible to every eye but your own.

The key seems to be finding compatibility; one of the techniques they have ripped off from dating sites like eHarmony is finding out, “Do you laugh at the same stuff?” If team members share a similar sense of humor with your team/support network, that can be key to getting through the rough times ahead.

Reid also talked about the value of “getting cheap shots on goal” early on in the process. That is, to roll out quick updates and features in your product set to get feedback, and a sense of just how valuable your product is with your core userbase.

Reid and Ben were the big draw among several big names (you can tell by the prominence they were given in the creativeLIVE marketing materials). Their session is helpful if you are at a somewhat more advanced level, not just a “backyard mad scientist working out of his garage.”

The entire collection of speakers were great, and my assessment of the Secrets of Silicon Valley sessions was that they provided opportunities for people who are harboring dreams to do a bit of rational soul-searching. It seems that after the past almost-decade of economic stagnation and frustration, there are a lot of people who are considering their futures, and challenging themselves to stretch beyond where they are.

My travels around the world, teaching classes of eager young wanna-bes, has demonstrated to me that at this moment in time, the world is full of people who are changing their life focus. They are saying to me,

“I need to find something to do with my life that makes me truly happy – not just something that makes me money. Although that would be nice.”

Sarah Leary and Nirav Tolia, of Nextdoor.com said that entrepreneurs should ask themselves, “Can you see yourself doing this for the next 10 years?”

The session with Nirav Tolia and Sarah Leary, the Co-Founders of NextDoor was a particular milestone in this emerging way of thinking. These serial entrepreneurs challenged the audience to start to think of the traits that they wanted in themselves, and in the companies they are trying to build.

They couched it in terms of Mercenaries v. Missionaries, because the greatest successes we see in the long term, are those of people (and companies) that are strategic, not just opportunistic. They broke it down this way:

(Please click here and check out the NextDoor session and order the video if you want to learn more)

See what I mean about the strong emotional and spiritual undercurrents that start to surface when we talk about this stuff?

I leaned over to Janine in the middle of one of these sessions, and she whispered to me,

“You can’t learn this in graduate school. When I first got interested in the Internet, I thought about going back to graduate school, but nobody was teaching what I wanted to learn yet. These speakers, who are creating completely new ways of doing business are sharing their latest experiences at creativeLIVE. You can’t learn anywhere else, and it doesn’t cost $100,000 in student loans.”

Rather than continue to toot the horns of all the people I saw, just go there yourself and check it out while you can. And maybe even pay a few shekels for these sessions. If you’re about to start your own business, or if you have already started your biz and are feeling freaked out and lost – this is about the best investment you can make. (Order the 2-day seminar video at http://www.creativelive.com/courses/secrets-silicon-valley)

Coming up next: a post about how I learned about a key trait for entrepreneurs from a never-retired C-47 pilot who flew over the Himalayas in WWII.

Strange to see an image that basically shows a virtual representation of millions of Americans existing inside my chest, next to my heart. There’s some patriotic metaphor here that I should probably make. based on the proximity of the 4th of July holiday, but at the time, I just thought it looked pretty.

I felt like I should have been wearing a scuba tank, flippers and a BC vest. Which, come to think of it, would not be out of place during the regular Seattle Rain Festival Jan.-Dec. every year. Boom!

It is very hard not to want to walk through these dioramas.

Little kids passing by were imitating the stoner-dude turtles of “Finding Nemo.” I’ll admit it – I kinda was too.

I kept thinking, “Man, if there’s an earthquake, this is going to be messy.” Then I stopped and just appreciated.

I had to hold my camera above my head to see this. Feels like a little special Easter Egg for all us tall folks.

Anyway, in Seattle, next to the Space Needle, the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum is filled with these amazing creations. Years ago, I saw an amazing documentary about Dale Chihuly, and how he had filled the canals in Venice with these amazing glass sculptures for a festival. It’s famous as the first documentary for PBS that was shot in HD, and you can view some of it over on Vimeo.

Snake in the bamboo.

Squidbait.

LIttle cockleshells, all in a row.

When asked what are the enduring lessons of the last five years for newspapers, various pundits have opined “Don’t enter an economic recession massively over-leveraged and dependent on fragile business models.”

One by one, newspapers are falling behind.

In Spain, the problems that we are experiencing in the U.S. are even more severe. The advertising base was even more reliant on crazy real-estate bubble advertising than it was here. Anyone who has flown into, say, Barcelona, and seen 20 MILES of empty housing developments, half-built apartment blocks, and gradually eroding graded hillsides, can quite easily judge what kind of devastation was left behind when that bubble burst.

But now comes the news that digital media has overtaken print in Spain. 

There is some disagreement over just how many digital news outlets have sprung up in the past couple years:

Ahora desde la AEEPP (Asociación Española de Editoriales de Publicaciones Periódicas) reconocen que tienen 763 publicaciones digitales asociadas aunque, Carlos Astiz, secretario general de la Asociación, estima que puede haber 3.000 medios digitales.

…and exactly what constitutes a regular news publication (such as when its edition are funded via crowdfunding:

En medio de la crisis que afecta a los medios tradicionales, han surgido en los últimos meses un gran número de medios digitales con fórmulas diferentes para conseguir la rentabilidad. Desde la existencia de socios que por un módico precio acceden antes a los contenidos como en diario.es o infolibre.es a proyectos financiados por crowdfunding como la revista FronteraD.

But the trend seems to be that digital-only publications have been designed from the ground-up to be profitable on this new platform. The publishers, operating on a shoestring, find an audience, find ways to monetize that audience, and then start to methodically try to scale up.

The opposite is in action with the traditional media. They have their audience – but it is shrinking.

They have their revenue streams – but they are evaporating.

So they are engaged in a massive scale-down. Cutting coverage, cutting staff, and according to the Difusion story, only weeks/months away from re-erecting the infamous paywall around El Pais that was widely credited with destroying the paper’s digital operations before they had even gotten a chance to find their footing. I wrote an entire case study about it (and El Tiempo’s desperate attempts to re-connect with the young audience that they had alienated & lost) for the NAA. 

Soon to run back behind the paywall. Maybe it will work this time. Then again, with so much new competition in the digital marketplace, and with the brand discredited & distrusted by younger readers … maybe it won’t.

Meanwhile, over in the digital-only world, site owners are waking up to the trend of “native advertising” – i.e. putting posts into the middle of the flow that look a lot LIKE the news stories that readers are there to check out … but that contain sponsored content, written in a way that doesn’t conflict with the rest of the content on the site.

Check out what John Battelle has to say about this evolution of monetization: 

The reason native works is because the advertising is treated as a unit of content on the platform where it lives. That may seem obvious, but it’s an important observation. When a brands’s content competes on equal footing alongside a publisher’s content, everyone wins. Those search ads – they win if they are contextually relevant and add value to the consumer’s search results. Those promoted tweets only get promoted if people respond to them – a signal of relevance and value.  The same is true for all truly “native” ad products. If the native ad content is good, it will get engagement. The industry is evolving toward rewarding advertising that doesn’t interrupt and is relevant and value additive. That’s a good thing.

Time is money. Image is everything. Manners maketh man. Your reputation precedes you.

And now, having a high (enough) Klout score wins you entry into the American Airlines first-class lounge, where you can look down your nose at the hoi polloi, and raid the “Continental breakfast with liquor” setup before your flight.

I know this is going to result in me getting spammed mercilessly by American Airlines for the next millennium. The question, as always, is – is it worth it?

The mutability of your online reputation, as measured by any of the upstarts trying to put a wrench onto this social media/word of mouth monster, into actual real-world rewards is a very tricky thing. Having a lot of YouTube followers (or blog readers) gets you onto the red carpet for movie premieres.  Mommy bloggers get to test-drive new models of minivans.

But in the past, these kinds of corporate reacharounds usually had the intervention of a PR agency. This iteration goes through Klout, and asks you to connect AA directly with your Klout account (and thru Klout, to all the social media sites you included in Klout to try to boost your score).

Insidious? Evil? Useful? I guess it depends on how sanguine you are to turn over all your personal data & connections to friends in return for something that can run a couple hundred bucks, and make waiting for your flight a lot more pleasant. Certainly a consideration, if the sequester cuts ever kick back in, and we face 8-hour delays again.

Still: “When you don’t know what the product being sold is … the product is you.”